Critical Essay by Hershel Parker

In the following essay, Parker chronicles the commercial and critical popularity of Billy Budd after its publication in the early twentieth century.

Many academic theorists are now fervently promulgating a relativistic approach in which the canon of American literature is seen as the product of political, racial, and sexual (far more than aesthetic) forces and in which the idea of enduring aesthetic value is seen as an illusion fostered by (old, male, Caucasian) power-holding ideologues. Among the most forceful and plausible of these is Barbara Herrnstein Smith, the author of the provocative lead article, “Contingencies of Value,” in the special issue of Critical Inquiry on canons (September 1983), an essay incorporated into her 1988 book...